To say this biography reads like a novel is to do biography an injustice. Biographers write un-novel-like narratives that tangle with the obduracy of fact and the ambiguities of interpretation. Finding a form for fact is biography’s besetting task. Creating a fictional world from scratch is overwhelming; it is hardly less daunting to shape one already in action.

When I first discovered that Robert McCrum began his biography with the only controversial event in P.G. Wodehouse’s life, I wondered if this gambit could be anything but a cheap trick, a way to grab the reader’s attention – not, in the long run, the means of doing justice to a quiet, undramatic – indeed bland – biography. If any writer has enjoyed a more sedate existence than Wodehouse, let me know.

I need not have wondered about Mr. McCrum’s ploy. Wodehouse’s career endangering broadcasts in 1941 from Berlin transformed his plight as a Nazi internee into a comic misfortune. They were, his latest biographer proves, of a piece with a writer determined to inhabit only a world fit for his fiction, a risible world dominated by the incomparable master/servant team of Jeeves and Wooster, relics of the Victorian/Edwardian England that had shaped Wodehouse’s sensibility.

While bombs were falling on Britain, Wodehouse (out of touch with his audience and his friends) sounded flippant – indeed treasonous – as he remarked, “There is a good deal to be said for internment.” If not a Nazi collaborator, Wodehouse showed himself to be a Nazi stooge, his legion of critics alleged.

Making light of his own trying circumstances – a lifelong habit – seemed not merely in bad taste but downright disloyal to a British establishment, which did not make its peace with Woodhouse until the final year of his long life, when he was knighted. Wodehouse realized he had made an ass of himself in Berlin, but he could never quite find the right tone to adopt in explaining how he could have made such an awful blunder. In effect, Mr. McCrum’s biography supplies the language that its subject sought in vain.

Not even a horrifying internment could shatter the comic world of Wodehouse’s imagination. He could write anywhere – even in a detention camp with 50 men mulling round and several looking over his shoulder as he drafted his novels. There is something quite gallant and moving about this dedication to his art. But there is also something terrifying in the thought that art can so exclude the exigencies of evil, and that the artist can so wall himself off from the misery of millions. Wodehouse was interned, at one point, only 30 miles from Auschwitz.

George Orwell defended Wodehouse, calling him an ideologically illiterate writer who had been blissfully unaffected by the political quarrels among writers in the 1930s. But he was not an innocent so much as simply detached. He lacked a connection to any world – real or imaginative – that did not issue from his own pen. When he was not writing, he was following sports (especially the cricket matches at Dulwich, his public school) or playing with his pekineses. War to Wodehouse, who played “senior boy” to other internees, was like an away match.

Mr. McCrum puts it much better, observing that it is wrong to consider Wodehouse impractical. After all, he was a shrewd manager of his own career and knew how to do business in Hollywood, New York, and London – not to mention dealing with agents and publishers around the world. I think Wodehouse provided Mr. McCrum with one of his best lines when Wodehouse, broadcasting from Berlin, began by saying his internship had addled his mind, so that he had a “certain disposition to ramble in my remarks” and to exhibit a “slight goofiness.” Or as Mr. McCrum then puts it, “Jeevesian in his professional life, it was his fate to be Woosterish in Berlin.”

Although Wodehouse recovered his audience after the war, he never again set foot in Britain. He lived a semi-reclusive life on Long Island, where he steadfastly produced works of comic genius celebrating “the butler belt” (as he called it).

If Wodehouse otherwise basked in the “continuity of a boring life,” as Mr. McCrum puts it, his biographer salvages what might have been a tedious biography by playing the straight man to his subject. How can there be a dull moment with Mr. McCrum constantly seguing into Wodehouse’s wonderfully hilarious, brilliant, prose:

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifting, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hand over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: “Guess who!”

No one ever heard Wodehouse talk like this. He was perfectly pleasant but not witty in conversation. It all went into the writing, into constant revision as Wodehouse worked his way to the comedy that detonates at the end of a perfectly timed sentence.

Wodehouse took his comedy very seriously, which is perhaps why he had so little patience not only for the rest of the world but for other kinds of writing. Here is part of his parody of T.S. Eliot:

I am a bat that wheels through the
air of Fate;
I am a worm that wriggles in a
swamp of Disillusionment;
I am a despairing toad;
I have got dyspepsia.

A believer in good form and the stiff upper lip, Wodehouse could not tolerate the lugubrious verse of self-pity.

There are some surprises in this biography. I had no idea that Wodehouse was so central to the development of the American musical. He was a deft lyricist, one of the first to fit lyrics to the work of Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and other important Broadway composers. Along with his partner Guy Bolton, he was also one of the first creators of books for musicals, helping to shape the American form of opera into an integrated art form.

Mr. McCrum wisely does not try to dissect the mechanics of Wodehouse’s comic style. The biographer knows when to step aside and let his subject rip. At the same time, he senses that Wodehouse needs a biographer to say what Wodehouse could not bring himself to confess. An autobiography, which would have to be a kind of apologia, would have been bad form. But biography has to break through reticence and provide a perspective the subject is just not equipped to provide. Thus Mr. McCrum finds in Wodehouse’s humor the “laughing love god” with an “understated tolerance of human frailty.” No less than Balzac, Wodehouse, in Mr. McCrum’s pages, emerges as a creator of the human comedy.